Bruce Lee is a complex and contradictory figure, and it’s a formidable task to take on the multiple facets of his legacy – fighter, film star, philosopher, nationalist, multiculturalist, innovator.  With an approach as multidisciplinary and iconoclastic as Lee’s approach to martial arts, Bowman provides an original and exhilarating account of Lee as ‘cultural event’.  No one has done a better job of explaining why the martial arts ‘legend’ remains such an important and provocative figure.

Leon Hunt (Brunel University), author of Kung Fu Cult Masters: From Bruce Lee to Crouching Tiger.

There are certain scenes which have the power to enthral, provoke, and delight—our cover captures one such titillating tableau. But what gives such a scene the ability to stand apart, to take on a life of its own? What is it about Robert De Niro’s “Are you talking to me?” scene that has such lasting cultural resonance? How does Gene Kelly dancing in the rain embody an entire ethos of escapism?

Continue reading the Editor’s Note

Each essay in this issue focuses on a single scene, and an embedded video clip of the scene under analysis is included.  Brenda Austin-Smith looks at Alice in the Cities, Murray Pomerance considers Hitchcock’s Torn Curtain, and Elena del Río includes her own short film in the Forward to the issue: What a Scene Can Do,  Other essays look at the Snuff Coda, Eastern Promises, That 70s Sequence, the Post-Mortem Western, and Joy Division and the Televised Performance Scene.

I was the web and layout editor once again, as well as a member of the editorial board.

Abstract: The Museum is a theoretical model that aims to render a media-saturated world in which our media have become saturated with media. Corporate conglomeration of the cultural industries has transformed the production and circulation of art; the Museum captures the inter-related complexities of this development in which the notion of a singular text breaks down in the wake of synergistic proliferation. Conceiving of this ‘new society’ requires new conceptions: a model (the Museum), a language (polytextuality), a discipline (cultural economy), and a product (the textwork). Section I establishes the ‘Geography of the Museum’, starting with its chief architect, André Malraux, who designs the neo-aesthetic foundation of the ‘Imaginary Museum’ (Chapter Three). The post-structural blueprints are then drawn up by Mikhail Bakhtin and Julia Kristeva, giving the Museum its polytextual essence (Chapter Four). The Museum is then physically erected by the conglomerated cultural industries, transforming the Imaginary Museum into a material consumer experience (Chapter Five). Section II turns to the ‘Display of the Museum’, cataloguing the different ways in which art manifests itself within the Museum. By way of Roland Barthes, the textwork is theorized, a dialogical designation for the type of networked cultural output that now dominates popular culture (Chapter Seven). Case studies of particularly illuminating textworks are then presented, illustrating the polytextual content of the Museum in a multitude of intersecting forms and mediums. A decisively polytextual museum exhibition, “KRAZY! The Delirious World of Anime + Comics + Video Games + Art”, as well as two films – Children of Men and V for Vendetta – are seen as literal embodiments of the Museum (Chapter Eight). The next textwork is concerned with intermedial structure, and focuses on the Wu-Tang Clan’s interpolation of certain cinematic genres, as well as other mediums (Chapter Nine). The final textwork is General Electric, the world’s largest conglomerate. Transformers and 30 Rock, two very different GE products, both explicitly exhibit corporate synergy through polytextuality (Chapter Ten). Over-arching cultural shifts are demonstrated by the Museum: access over ownership, circulation over distribution, dialogue over delivery, digital social text over authorship, and multiple over singular.

…in this, our 5th anniversary issue, we set out to navigate the murky and uncharted depths of ‘alternative cinema’. But carving out an epistemology of this amorphous cinema is no small endeavour-and what do we mean by ‘alternative cinema’ anyway? On the one hand, it is always evolving, always repositioning itself outside mainstream modes of representation: once the mainstream appropriates elements of alternative style, new configurations naturally spring up in response. At the same time, it has no singular mandate, no fixed ideological underpinnings, and is beholden to no specific national cinema or film movement.

Continue reading the Editor’s Note

Steffen Hantke on Hitler as Actor, Jerry White on From Ingushetia to the Finland Station, William Beard’s interview with Guy Maddin, and more, including Holocaust Exploitation, Post-Soviet Freakonomics, and Cinematic Prosthesis.

I was the web and layout editor, as well as a member of the editorial board.

Abstract: The sellebrity auteur injects the consideration of commerce and celebrity into conventional theories of film authorship, highlighting the political economic factors in a film’s creation and the struggle between art and commerce that this process involves, as well as the director’s brand identity and celebrity cachet as it is exploited both by the director and the industry.  Spike Lee and his production company, 40 Acres & A Mule Filmworks, are emblematic of the way contemporary Hollywood filmmakers must be heavily involved in the business-end of film production in order to retain artistic control.  His skill at managing the Spike Lee brand name has resulted in his transformation into a valuable commodity.  From his ability to incessantly create controversy to his numerous and various commercial enterprises, Lee has exploited his celebrity in order to continue his prolific cinematic output.

• Fight the Power!: The Spike Lee Reader has won the National Communication Association African American Communication and Culture Division’s 2009 Outstanding Book award.

Much has been made in recent years of the death of genre, or at least its gradual weakening. Post-genre is the buzzword. Pointing out “Hollywood’s propensity for generic hybridity and overlap in his discussion of the action adventure film, Steve Neale makes the case that cinematic genres have started to move massively away from single distinct genres since the 1980s and ’90s (71) and toward a new polygeneric narrative that seems to transcend all inherited boundaries. This means that, by implication, there must have been an earlier period in which genres used to be, at least relatively speaking, distinct. In the Editor’s Note to a recent issue of Cinephile, Andrew deWaard suggests to read the sense of “perpetual aftermath” that dominates contemporary conceptions of genre not as a sign of its imminent demise but as an invitation for reconceptualization:

We can’t really leave genre behind anymore than we can abandon modernism or industry or structuralism – we’ve just mutated it to the point that it somehow feels new or different. Maybe we should start thinking ‘post’ as less of a temporal marker and more like computational logic. Let’s think of it as an upgrade: Genre 2.0, based on the same fundamental hardware, but with such forward-thinking software that it hardly warrants comparison. (2)

Tom LeClair’s approach to, and use of, genre in the Passing trilogy falls squarely into this model of what one might call “post-genre” for literary fiction. The hardware, as deWaard calls it, is still there, even though the software has been upgraded – to call it “forward-thinking” feels right as well. Readers are supposed to recognize the machinations of genre at work; the writing is intertextual enough, though never obtrusively so, to evoke the history of literary and cinematic adventure. The polygenericity of the trilogy, articulated as a series of shifts from one genre to another, does not undermine the validity of each single genre; instead, it follows an experimental logic. In his exploration of adventure, LeClair “tries out” genres; his moving on to the next is never a dismissal of the previous one. He is not out to abolish genres; does not exploit, consume, or use them up.

Hantke goes on to note that LeClair does not engage in satire, irony or pastiche — typical markers of postmodern genre play — before concluding his essay:

If the Passing trilogy is never patronizing or dismissive of adventure, it is an expression of LeClair’s generosity as a writer, as well as of the skill with which he sustains the tone in all three novels. But, more importantly, it is an expression of his recognition that adventure, as deWaard points out, is an enduring trope in Western culture. If it is simply not an option just to “leave it behind,” then to criticize it makes most sense if the critique is constructive. Adventure may be maligned as politically untenable, as escapism for the immature or uneducated; its hyperbolic pace and near-mythical iconography may seem absurd in a world of bourgeois security and moderation. But then, time and again, the reports of adventure’s imminent death have been greatly exaggerated. It deserves to be taken seriously because there is a place for adventure even in a culture that tells itself that there isn’t. What this place might be, Tom LeClair’s trilogy helps us to understand and imagine.

When I wrote that Editor’s Note, I was only really considering cinematic genre, so I appreciate Hantke applying my thoughts to literary genre as well.  After all, the use of polygeneric narrative can be seen as something of a journey, the author taking the reader on a metatextual ride through a history of iconography, myth and archetype; adventure is a fitting study for this brave new generic world.

Abstract: In October of 2007, Radiohead self-released their latest album, In Rainbows, bypassing the corporate record industry and its major label dominance, allowing fans to download the album in mp3 format for whatever price each consumer felt appropriate.  When one logged on to InRainbows.com to download the album, instead of a price at the checkout basket, there was a box to fill-in with a question mark beside it.  Clicking on the question mark prompted a message: “It’s Up To You.”  Clicking again refreshed the screen: “No Really, It’s Up To You.”  This choice included zero dollars, if one was so inclined.  A highly publicized event, the press was quick to comment that this was the first major album whose price was determined by the consumer, but might it be the first major commodity whose price is determined by the consumer?  This ‘pay-what-you-want’ experiment, then, was not just about the changing nature of a music industry in crisis, but of late capitalism itself, of our conceptions of commodity value, labour, and intellectual property in the digital age.  If we accept Jacques Attali’s thesis that music is prophetic, and that every major social rupture has been preceded by a mutation in the codes, audition and economy of music, then what is our current system of music telling us about our future?  By putting the onus of value on the consumer, Radiohead allowed the public to vote for an alternative vision of society by way of, increasingly and unfortunately, the only method available: the consumer dollar.  The shifting terrain of popular culture and the entertainment market, especially the music industry and its forthcoming ‘celestial jukebox,’ is analyzed from the perspective of Radiohead’s symbolic act, with an eye toward the digital revolution’s role in music’s long history of social upheaval.

Genre may be an easy or convenient starting point for analysis and interpretation, but how much does it really matter anymore? Maybe the core film genres have just been around too long; they’ve been maimed and manipulated to such a degree that they no longer resemble their ‘original’ self in any substantial way… We can’t really leave genre behind anymore than we can abandon modernism or industry or structuralism – we’ve just mutated it to the point that it somehow feels new or different. Maybe we should start thinking ‘post’ as less of a temporal marker and more like computational logic. Let’s think of it as an upgrade: Genre 2.0, based on the same fundamental hardware, but with such forward-thinking software that it hardly warrants comparison.

Continue reading Editor’s Note

The issue starts with Susan Ingram’s Cosmotrash: A New Genre for a New Europe, followed by a look at so-called ‘torture porn’ in Gorno: Violence, Shock and Comedy.  Barry Keith Grant was generous enough to share an excerpt from his forthcoming book Shadows of a Doubt: The Fallacy of the Crisis of Masculinity, while other essays consider Irreversible, A Cinema of Cruelty, Cinema from Attractions, The Wire, and The HBO-ification of Genre.  My own essay is also included, entitled The Geography of Melodrama, The Melodrama of Geography: The ’Hood Film’s Spatial Pathos.

stupid internet. somehow drunken vegas stories don’t really seem like a good idea anymore with teachers getting fired over pictures on facebook and what have you.

stay tuned for the 3.0 update.  coming soon.

update: i’m back!  75% less embarrassing and career-threatening!

fleet foxes – sun giant ep & fleet foxes
[myspace] [torrent] [torrent]

no age – nouns
[myspace] [torrent]

portishead – the third
[myspace] [torrent]

be your own pet (rip) – get awkward
[myspace] [torrent]

erykah badu – new amerykah part one (4th world war)
[myspace] [torrent]

times new viking – rip it off
[myspace] [torrent]

land of talk – some are lakes
[myspace] [torrent]

hercules and love affair – hercules and love affair
[myspace] [torrent]

hold steady – stay positive
[myspace] [torrent]

tokyo police club – elephant shell
[myspace] [torrent]

hayden – in field & town
[myspace] [torrent]

the raconteurs – consolers of the lonely
[myspace] [torrent]

cut copy – in ghost colours
[myspace] [torrent]

the vivian girls – the vivian girls
[myspace] [torrent]

beck – modern guilt
[myspace] [torrent]

el guincho – Alegranza
[myspace] [torrent]

lil wayne – tha carter 3
[myspace] [torrent]

quiet village – silent movie
[myspace] [torrent]

broken social scene presents brendan canning - something for all of us
[myspace]

flying lotus – los angeles
[myspace] [torrent]

tv on the radio – dear science
[myspace] [torrent]

girl talk - feed the animal
[myspace] [pay what you want]

crystal castles finally gave birth to the sublimated unconscious of my 8 bit ninja gaiden youth… no age and times new viking and the vivian girls found the brian wilson in fuzz… fleet foxes brought me back to folky pussy shit (a continual flee and return process)… portishead defied the rules of comeback… be your own pet finally made it across the border for my third attempt to see them live.  jemma cursed at the audience and left early.  they broke up soon after.  i wouldn’t want it any other way… tokyo police club and land of talk couldn’t live up to the un-live-up-to-able quality of their debut eps, but their debut albums are all too solid… hercules and love affair replaced the field for my go-to doin it album… the hold steady kept up the sing-a-long songs as scripture… hayden piled on the proof that his ‘lush’ era (from skyscraper on) far outweighs his lo-fi era… jack white is still god, but he’s jesus in the desert, lost and tempted by satan.  2k9er should be a stripes year… cut copy made us dance and beck made us remember why we love beck… broken social scene, a project based on continual renewal, continued to renew.  liz powell from land of talk singing on 2 tracks certainly didn’t hurt… quiet village and flying lotus and el guincho chopped and mashed with finesse, while girl talk continued to impress…